Parent Resources

Nesrin Shaheen is a director and founding president of the Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis Foundation in Canada. Her daughter was the first positively identified case...

Catherine Clarke is a former nurse (SRN), midwife (SCM) and chiropodist (MSSCH MBChA.) Following her son’s violent propulsion into the mental health system, she...

Beatrice Birch began her career as a teacher in an inner-city Waldorf/Rudolf Steiner School in Bristol, England in 1975.  Deeply inspired by the healing...

Aimee Inomata, PhD, is a writer, researcher and reformed academic who uses her training in philosophy and literature to critically analyze the underlying rhetoric...

Reid Bertino is a 30 year old man with a long history with the mental health system. From start to finish, the mental health...

Stephen LaCorte is an attorney in Texas who has worked in the oil and gas industry.  He was harmed by benzodiazepines after being negligently...

Dr. Ken Blatt trained when psychiatry was steeped in a humanistic, philosophic and social/relational tradition. He believes that in the last decades psychiatry has shifted to a...

The Wrong Profession? After nearly 15 years of working in the pharmaceutical industry, Amy's mission is to help women avoid, reduce, and eliminate their need...

Dr. Christopher Gordon is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Assistant Psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Adjunct Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at...

Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Claire Bien, M.Ed., is a writer and grant writer at The Connection. She is also a voice hearer and formed the...

Otto Douglas is a York University graduate whose psychiatric incarceration opened his eyes to a previously unknown world — a world in which human...

MIA-UMB News Editor: Justin Karter is a writer, researcher and community organizer with graduate degrees in both journalism and community psychology. He is a doctoral...

MIA-UMB News Team: Marta E. Pagán-Ortiz is a doctoral student and research assistant in the Counseling and School Psychology PhD program at UMass Boston. Marta...

MIA-UMB News Team: Peter Simons comes from a background in the humanities where he studied English, philosophy, and art. Now working on his PhD in...

MIA-UMB News Team: Akansha Vaswani is a therapist and a researcher with a particular interest in the lived experiences of people’s lives. Her studies...

MIA-UMB News Team: Shannon Peters is a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Boston and has a master’s degree in mental health counseling....

Merry Citoli is an award-winning singer/songwriter and screenplay writer whose life went into a downward spiral after being put on lorazepam for insomnia and...

David Baksh,  co-director and cinematographer for Yoghurt Utopia, has had a diverse directing career, which spans broadcast TV, commercials, event visuals and award-winning digital ad campaigns,  making...

Anna Thomson, co-director/producer of the Yoghurt Utopia documentary, is a director of documentaries and drama-docs who has worked for Discovery, Nat Geo, History Channel, BBC, Sky Arts and...

Valerie L. Marsh, MSW, is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR). Marsh received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social...

After three decades as a "patient," Julie Greene began to write about human rights abuses in the System, a battle that almost killed her....

Valerie L. Marsh, MSW, is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR). Marsh received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social...

The stakes are very high when loving parents anxiously sit down across from a child psychiatrist who has completed an ADHD evaluation of their child. All of the parents' high hopes for their precious child's well-being and future happiness are pressing on the parent's heart and mind. The psychiatrist leans to the side, reaches into a drawer, and lifts out a life-size model of a human brain for the parent or parents to see. The little five-year-old sitting on the floor playing stops and looks up at a model of his or her brain as the psychiatrist breaks the bad news. And the question is formed right then in the little boy or little girl's soul that may haunt the child for the rest of their lives – "Why is there something wrong with my brain?"

Giovanni Andrea Fava earned his medical degree from the University of Padova in 1977.  In Padova he also completed his residency training in psychiatry.  After...

Emily Lupsor is a social worker in Charlotte, North Carolina where she uses her lived experience to inform her practice. Emily facilitates a mutual...